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it be on this Christmas? Where can I buy a CD?
(Answers: British author and journalist Frederick Forsyth; it’s on
As It Happens
every Christmas Eve; and the CD is now available from CBC gift stores.) A close runner-up would beReading, as in
Where did that Reading thing originate? Why do you keep making those references to Reading?
    The “Reading thing” goes something like this: whenever we have a particularly silly story from England—an interview, say, with a woman whose fondness for garden gnomes has led her to establish a gnome sanctuary—Barbara Budd will
extro
it by saying something like:
    Ann Atkins is the founder and keeper of the Garden Gnome Reserve, and we reached her in Abbots Bickington. That is
240
kilometres west of Reading, and from the Garden Sanctuary it would take
720,000
garden gnomes, lined up hat to hat, to reach dear Reading.
    In other words, Reading is the centre of the universe, and the story’s distance from the centre is calculated using a distinctive system of measurement.
    There are a couple of explanations as to how this silliness got started. One version is that one day, after interviewing someone in Reading, Al Maitland said, helpfully, “Reading is 30 miles west of London.” A few minutes later, there was a story from London, and Alan said, “[Jane Doe] spoke to us from London … which is 30 miles east of Reading.” It’s the sort of thing Al would have done.
    Former AIH producer George Somerwill, however, says his is the true version. He’d been working on the show for only about a week, he says, when he booked one of those wacky English people—a “tongue-in-cheek story” is how he puts it—who happened to be somewhere in Berkshire, not all that far from where George himself used to live and not far from Reading.
    We recorded the item about ten minutes past five, and it was slotted early in the programme, so I had only a fewminutes to cut it, top-and-tail it and write the green—in those days, we wrote our scripts on five-part green paper. When I came to the
extro,
I wrote: “John So-and-So spoke to us from … [whatever-the-village-was]
.”
    Then I thought, No one will know where that is.
So I added,
“which is nine miles from Reading.” And that’s what Al read on the air.
    Somerwill, in his innocence, assumed that this would make everything clear. He was set straight a moment later, when the show’s producer, Bob Campbell, exploded out of the studio, roaring, “WHERE THE HELL IS READING?”
    Everyone found this quite funny, so from then on, whenever anyone had a nutty story from England, he would cite its distance from Reading and, well, we’ve just never stopped. Somerwill, who now works for the United Nations in Liberia, says people still come up to him and say, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who used to work on
As It Happens?
Started that Reading thing?”
    I rather imagine it was producer George Jamieson who started measuring the distance in supine gnomes and the like; it’s the sort of thing
he
would do.
    In any event, the Reading references drive one poor soul right around the bend and straight to his phone. We call him the Reading Man.
    “You stupid,
stupid
people” is the way his message usually starts. “When are you going to stop these
stupid
references to Reading. It’s so STUPID!”
    And of course, the answer to the Reading Man’s question is: never. Our producers are a sick and twisted lot, I’m afraid; the more abuse they get from the Reading Man, the more determined they are never to stop this admittedly childish habit.
    They get such a kick out of it that they decided, one day, to see if they couldn’t find a similar reference point in the U.S. I think the idea arose just after we’d talked to the nice man from Menomonie, Wisconsin, about the sudden disappearance of his moose. Moose stories always remind me of that scene in the TV show
Murphy Brown
where Murphy, played by Candice Bergen, is dismissing a rumour that she might be replaced by